Why Twitter and Facebook fail the leadership test

Short-sheeting your brother’s bed is a dirty trick (“Oh, you brat!”). Impersonating a government official to rig an election is a felony.

But the sad truth is most of us don’t care. We don’t expect any better from our leaders. We don’t believe what they say, and who can blame us. In the political arena, at least, we have been conditioned to ignore all the faux wounded hyperbole and ersatz indignation of our leaders. Every day someone in government does something so egregious it can only be fixed by his or her resignation, or maybe by the prime minister’s resignation or someone’s ceremonial disembowelment. Who’s to know when something serious actually happens?

Many business leaders are just as disingenuous, obtuse, evasive and self-serving. Leadership in the worlds of religion, not-for-profits and at the local community level is no more inspiring. If perception is reality then we are one sorry family of man because around the world we perceive our leaders as a dismal lot.

You know this because you are aware of the U.S. race for the Republican presidential nomination, or our own robo-call scandal, a dysfunctional city council and mayor’s office or countless other examples that range from bumbling buffoonery to malicious malfeasance. I know it because my colleagues in research at Ketchum surveyed people in 12 countries to find out what they think about leaders. The results were dismal. (Press release on Canadian results at http://bit.ly/GCotzV)

There is a huge gap — 28 percentage point difference — between what we expect from our leaders and what we think they deliver.

Business leaders were the best of a weak lot, with a little more than a third of respondents giving them an excellent rating of eight or above on a scale of 0-10. (In Canada, leaders of not-for-profits were the best of a weak lot.) Even more surprising, among businesses, leaders in banking and financial services rated near the top of the pack. (Leaders of tech companies were rated highest by 44 per cent of respondents for effective leadership, compared to consumer packaged goods firms at the opposite end of the spectrum, cited by just 20 per cent for effective leadership.)

Truth is we don’t ask for an awful lot to rate someone as effective leader. We crave good leaders and believe that we need them to guide us through these difficult times. Around the world, across many countries and languages, people were pretty consistent about their expectations.

1. Close the Say-Do Gap – People aren’t as stupid as our leaders seem to think. If you say you love people and then you bomb them, or take away their jobs, or their health care, or abuse their trust, they will grow cynical. We want more from our leaders than catchy slogans and lyrical sound bites. We want people who lead by example, who have the courage and commitment to act, and who keep a level head in a crisis.2. Strong, Silent Types Need Not Apply – As important as it is to act decisively and with integrity, leaders also must keep people informed. In the absence of clear communication – whenever there is ambiguity – we will assume the worst. So, no to slogans and sound bites but yes to clear, consistent communication, with a little humility. Be willing to admit mistakes. Be aware that different situations require different leadership styles, and different leadership styles require different communication styles, but they all require good communication.3. Don’t sugar-coat it – The survey was decisive on this. Speak the truth with purpose and without ambiguity. We can handle a challenge if we understand it and if we know what our leaders are doing to address it.4. The way to be seen to be trustworthy is to be trustworthy – (See No. 1, Close the Say-Do Gap.) For organizations to be seen to be leaders, nothing rated higher in the survey than trustworthiness, including quality of products, services or management, financial strength, or innovation.5. Let Them Look You In The Eyes – Face-to-face communication is by far the communication channel that creates the greatest sense of leadership credibility. The lack of credibility given to some digital communication channels was surprising given their fast proliferation, but we believe Twitter feeds and social media are useless for leadership because most of the content doesn’t meet the other criteria for effective leadership. It’s usually bland marketing speak and sloganeering, and it’s rarely actually written by the leader. Does anyone believe Stephen Harper writes his own Tweets?

The bad news is we have grown so cynical that we expect our leaders are going to be even worse in 2012 than they were in 2011. There is such a powerful hunger in so many to be anointed “a leader” and then to hang onto that perceived power that they have forgotten the fundamental tenet of leadership – that they work for the people they are leading.

The good news is we have grown so cynical about our leaders — they are so lacking in credibility to us — that eventually we’ll do something about it.

Geoffrey Rowan is a reformed journalist and public relations executive who consults on leadership communication matters. That means he has an opinion on just about everything, but mostly he writes about... read more the vagaries of leaders and of communicators, though he will stray into comical observations on things in the news. He's a transplanted American, having married a Canadian and lost the discussion on where to live. But that has worked out just fine, especially now with three kids. The earliest career goal he can remember was garbageman, because as a five-year-old the idea of hanging off the back of a big truck seemed like the best thing you could do with your life. Then it was to play shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals; then to be a stand up comedian; and then a journalist. After 20 years as a reporter in the US and Canada, he moved into public relations and has never looked back. "There is both great art and great science in telling stories in a way that grabs people and helps them understand something," he says. "You've got to enjoy being mixed up in everything the world has to offer, like a garbageman. You've got to be agile and responsive, like a shortstop. And it helps to be able to make people laugh and to tell a good story."View author's profile